Book 2: Ch.5
CONTENT WARNING:
This content contains mature situations, violence,
and what some may consider gore and inappropriate for children.
Discretion is advised.
CHAPTER 5
The Zeitgeist is falling
The green fog walls the aisle. It mushrooms against the ceiling and hangs in the air without dissipating. Frances locks eyes with one of her gaunt assailants that are standing over her. With a beakish face and a stretching neck he is a vulture in human guise. He gives a silent command beckoning his brethren. With a disgusted gaze and a flick of his wrist he conveyed a single, grim order: take her away. As three vampiric fiends seized her, dragging her into the night Frances can see a swirling miasma of sickly green fog devour the rest of the other vampires before a terrifying hush fell on them.
Even as she writhed against their iron grasp, each of the three vampires gradually slacken their grip. Listening to a rising noise within the fog. Every muscle of her body strained in desperate resistance while a rising symphony of horror stilled her captives. Finally, she hears it, and even Frances steps into a state of stagnation as dread compels them all to take pause.
A cacophony of an unearthly chorus of crunches, squelches, and snapping rings out. It is an unnerving, methodical beat that places any questions of danger in limbo. The ambiguous sloshing, grating wrings and incessant sounds of snapping continue in a domino cascade, echoing through the aisles. There were no screams. Only the unsettling wet, perverse noises.
For a moment, they were one shared heart quaking feebly. Suddenly, Out of the murk, one attacker staggered forward. His hands clutched to his chest and his face frozen in sickly, inhuman terror. It is the vulturistic vampire, stiff as a taxidermied wildcat. His body is a clay statue as it makes a steep collapse forward. His fall shatters his arm with a sickening snap, and in that instant, the grim truth clattered into clarity as the realization hits of what exactly they've been hearing. Bones. Cracking, breaking, sinew and bones.
As the green mist evaporated, the scene revealed a grotesque spectacle of over a dozen vampiric fiends now laying mutilated. Their bodies, twisted into a gory mosaic of brittle bone shards, spattered blood, and torn muscle. Frances and her attackers gawk in terror at the unrecognizable, tenderized mounds protruding from under the shallow and misty atmosphere. The haunting chill of silence; not a scream or gasp had been heard from the vampires smeared across the concrete. Frances looks around for what could have done this.
A tide of dark figures ascend from the second level. They walk amid the carnage. Examining the bodies in an attempt to understand what happened. Their faces may be hidden in paint, but the whites of their eyes are contorted in horror. A thin, bitter half smile dances across Frances's lips as she observes fear etch itself upon their expressions.
In that moment, taking a small window of opportunity, she wrenches herself free. Pulling away from her captives grip and maneuvering around them successfully, avoiding all three.
All the while she doesn't notice an unknown presence lurked nearby. In the chaos of her escape, she collides with a figure who steps forward form the shadows. He was a homeless transient. His attire a tattered, stained, dingy green hoodie three sizes too big that hung like oily silk, and hand-me-down army pants bearing the faded signature of the '70s. In a crash of bodies, she grabs at his anchored figure. Thrashing at him scared, thinking he is another assailant, breaking the necklace he bares. She realizes he is not wearing the fine black linen that the vampires adorn in uniform.
'This poor homeless, transient, or vagabond probably came to my aid', she thinks, 'I hope he has enough sense to run' Her mind a frantic whirl of survival strategies. That's all Frances can record in a blink as it dawns on her that he is of no danger and moves past him. Driven by pure instinct, she dashes for her car, her pounding heart urging her to flee as if chase has not yet ceased. In order to survive she must be faster. She must keep moving. Her sneakers loudly hitting the ground as she runs with all her force to get to her car. She hears no indication of chase. None the less she frantically unlocks her car. Once inside, panic commandeered her actions. The keys are stabbed into the ignition. In too much of a hurry to put a seat belt on, the car's gear is aggressively jerked into reverse and with her athletic shoe Frances slams on the gas. Violently her car launches in reverse. The ruthless momentum sends her careening into a parked car. The impact reverberating through her skull when she wraps her head against the door.
When she could lift her gaze once more as the haze of pain began to subside, Frances sees the ragged homeless man was advancing upon the encroaching predators. They closed in around him, fangs gleaming with malevolent hunger, salivating for an imminent feast. An attempt to intimidate him, surely. Their attempt fails as he continues towards them unbothered. Still, for Frances, panic surged within her veins. Frantic hope spurred her to toggle the car into drive, 'This poor man is going to be torn apart' She predicts. Maybe she can run a few of them over and offer the man an escape with her. She tries but the rear end crash caused some sort of jam and with the lever in drive the car still doesn't budge. Periodically she looks up to keep an eye on the unfolding situation. Soon to her horror, she lays her eyes on terror and carnage.
In a moment that defies mortal pacing, this vagabond moves with speed that is preternatural. The speed of his movement is not a mere supernatural flash or blip but strikes as swift as a cheetah pouncing using speed and agility to chase down its hapless prey. Launching himself from vampire to vampire to catch them, quickly closing the distance. He tackles some of the sinister dark figures. His limbs moved with raw, animalistic force, his strikes arch like the savage claws of a lion. One vampire courageously accosts him head on. His black trench coat flowing like a cape as he throws a punch with great vigor. This drifter matches his strike. Their fists collide, and the crushing blow erupts in a red burst so violent, it resounded like a gunshot, so devastating that there is a Shockwave and its energy cracks Frances's windshield. In that brutal instant, torn black fabric pealed back to revealed stark white bone and shredded muscle, annihilating the vampire's forearm down to a grisly stump.
Revolted, her jaw falls slowly before a squeamishness overcomes her. He exemplifies his strength mashing them in his hands like grapes. They tear as easily as paper. Red rain fountains, at one point spraying in all directions. A gruesome ballet of destruction. One ravenous attacker after another crumbles as he crushes them effortlessly. At the hands of this homeless man, if he can even be considered a man at this point, some of the vampires pop, the way bugs do on a windshield. There is no other way to describe their fall. They are absolutely trounced. They were not going up against an apex predator who was hunting, they were being stomped out like unwanted insects. Faltered under his ferocity and a monstrous strength that left no room for escape.
Frances watches, horrified yet magnetically captivated by the raw power. Dismantling them with brutal precision. Paralyzed by trepidation she is transfixed on the ominous new terror that now stalks the night. Somewhere in her, fascination begins to build to where she forgot she was even trying to drive off. Unsettled to know that there is someone in the world with that much power.
There is a cold sensation coming from between her fingers that grabs at her attention. She looks and discovers a chain. The necklace she broke off the homeless man must have entangled around her hand. On the necklace hangs a brass ring. Frances clutches the ring with a trembling hand, her breath shaky, as she looks back up to see the final moments of carnage, till finally only one dark silhouette remains. The last vampire who has shed what remnants were left in his need to intimidate as he quivers at the thought of engaging in contest. Not after what his eyes have captured, not after the slaying he can't unsee. In a desperate act, he raced for a railing and hurled himself over, dropping down into the levels below.
Just then, blue and red flashing lights and deafening sirens converge in the parking garage. Before police can reach the third story the homeless man turned his bloodstained gaze toward Frances. Standing in a dominion of blood, a lake of red and death before him. Dripping of crimson, he lingers.
His face is shrouded in shadows and at this distance from Frances his features are indistinguishable. His eyes hold a glint the way cats eyes reflect light in the dark. Frances can make out those lights in his eyes and that his bloodstained visage is fixed on her. They are more than mere savagery. In his eyes burned an intent, a radiant conviction, a silent vow to reclaim what is his. He is more than staring at her. He is studying her. He wants to remember her and Frances remarks to herself as her heart sinks into a cold pool of terror, "You want to remember me? You're going to come find me. To get back your necklace." The thought sends a chill of inevitability creeping into her soul.
As the lights and sirens get closer the once thought to be homeless man, leaps from an opening on the third level as the forces of law and order close in.
A dam of tears breaks and streams down her face. In the past few minutes Frances has watched a massacre. "There is a monster that prowls the night… and now… he'll be coming for me." She says in apprehension as she glares down at the necklace on her hand. As the sirens wailed and officers flooded the scene, her trembling hand caressed the cold chain. It was no mere trifle but a souvenir of the irreversible crossing of a threshold. A symbol of her fate sealed. What terror comes for her now? In that moment, the world had shifted. The night was no longer merely dark. She sees it now as physically deadly. Predator filled. It's the undoing of her foundational beliefs. In the new nocturne of her existence, every fragment of urban decay, every alleyway shadow, and every distant echo pulsed with the menace of blood thirsty scavengers. Frances felt a nauseating current of dread because the scavengers are not what she's afraid of. It is the species who she can see dwells above the food chain.
Frances's mind whirled with disconcerting revelations. Her body frozen still, paralyzed by thought, her eyes fixed on the spot the vagabond had stood. Primal power that defied mortal comprehension. Blue and red police lights silently flash over her face as officers arrive. The night has shed its benign darkness, now a transformed realm where every heartbeat was a stanza in an endless, brutal elegy of gore and evaded despair.
This city became undesirable having changed with profound metamorphosis. The urban sprawl, once passive and predictable, now teemed with jagged tensions. Every shadowed corner suggested the presence of those who thrived beyond the constraints of human morality. The predators of the dark, the creatures that once belonged only to the pages of Gothic horrors, had emerged. She was the witness to the cataclysmic evolution of night becoming something more feral for her than ever before. Fractals of harsh reality bled into her perception. She grasps how deeply the fabric of her existence had been rewoven, only starting to touch the surface of an underworld. No longer the timid soul who once navigated bustling streets with guarded safety, Frances stands at the epicenter of a reborn mythos. The monsters are real and they are nothing like what she imagined. All the old ideas of vampires are tearing down within her. This zeitgeist is falling and Frances can feel the seismic shift of her consciousness. Where the rules of survival are being rewritten and they are not inked in black, on the pages of her books, they are inked in blood.
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